Hitchcock claims that what attracted him to Marnie was "the fetish idea. A man wants to go to bed with a thief because she is a thief." Marnie (Tippi Hedren) is the last in a long line of Hitchcock's cold blondes, except this one is literally frigid. By creating a hero, Mark (Sean Connery) in love with a thieving woman who threatens to exploit and manipulate him, and who is frigid and man-hating to boot, Hitchcock exposes the masochism behind Mark's macho demeanor of always being in control at the same time as he puts him in control of Marnie's fate. Like the policeman boyfriend in Blackmail, Mark forces Marnie to marry him because he knows her guilty secret. In his portrayal of Mark's love as both compassionate and tender and brutal and dominating, and by making Marnie both bitch and victim (like so many of Hitchcock's characters, her trouble stems from a mother who loved her too much and not enough), Hitchcock is clearly using his characters to enact and abreact psychological situations that he knows a lot about. This makes the generally underrated Marnie a rich and fascinating film, a summation of themes and motifs familiar to students of his work, and a fitting ending to a Hitchcock retrospective. -Marilyn Fabe